Historiography and what statues or monuments come to represent. What keeps coming back to me, lines from Elizabeth Bishop’s The Monument, a poem I can’t find online.

Now can you see the monument? It is of wood built somewhat like a box. No. Built like several boxes in descending sizes one above the other. Each is turned half-way round so that its corners point toward the sides of the one below and the angles alternate. Then on the topmost cube is set a sort of fleur-de-lys of weathered wood, long petals of board, pierced with odd holes, four-sided, stiff, ecclesiastical. From it four thin, warped poles spring out, (slanted like fishing-poles or flag-poles) and from them jig-saw work hangs down, four lines of vaguely whittled ornament over the edges of the boxes to the ground. The monument is one-third set against a sea; two-thirds against a sky. The view is geared (that is, the view’s perspective) so low there is no “far away,” and we are far away within the view.